I think that people know that [a Dead Kennedys reformation]
is out of the question. There was one local fly-by-nighter who offered $100,000
for ten days but I didn't dignify that call with a reply. The most ridiculous
offer of all was from Gene Simmons of KISS calling me up wanting movie rights
to Frankenchrist trial (where Biafra defended an H.R. Giger poster
included with the record deemed "harmful matter," on the grounds of free
speech, as detailed on his spoken-word album High Priest of Harmful
Matter). Meeting Frank Zappa was one of the few silver
linings to come out of the trial. He got a hold of me and the helpers of the
No More Censorship Defense Fund rather than us having to find
him. He gave me some very valuable advice very early on; something that anybody
subjected to that kind of harassment should remember: You are the victim. You
have to constantly frame yourself that way in the mass media so you don't get
branded some kind of outlaw simply because of your beliefs and the way you
express your art. The outlaws are the police. I got to visit Frank two or three
more times at his house in Los Angeles and those were very special times. He
showed me a hilarious Christian aerobics video. The women were in their
skintight leotards doing jumping jacks. "One-two, two-two, three-two, praise
the Lord!" And of course the bustiest one was in a striped spandex suit dead
ront center of the screen!

I'm drying out from recording and mixing a track, of all things, a
Willie Nelson "tribute album". For anybody who knows the
song," Still is Still Moving to Me," it's the closest thing to a, oh, a
Dead Kennedys "Holiday in Cambodia" sounding song that he ever
came up with, and the lyrics are cool too.

Working with Al Jourgensen was never a dull moment. He's
the Jerry Lee Lewis of the 90's....... what can we do? He was
even supposed to produce Jerry Lee but I guess Jerry Lee backed out at the last
minute.

Ice-T is one of the most brilliant people I've ever met. I
don't agree with all of his views-especially in the area of women! - but
overall he's a fascinating person to be around. The intelligence and energy
just kind of rubs off and sparkles. "Cop Killer" is the "Born to Be Wild" of
the 90's. Everything that people find shocking now will routine in ten years.
It always works out that way. Remember when Elvis Presley's
legs were banned from television? I envision that someday an ad will come on
television," Remember the good old 90's? Well relive the nostalgia with
Cop-Killers-Hating Whitey in the 90's, starring Body Count,
Ice Cube, Ice-T, NWA,
Snoop Doggy Dog..." you name it.

We played shows together with Black Flag, we networked
together, tipped each other to promoters in different cities when one of us
would run across somebody new. There was much more of a cohesive bond between
the bands that were then called punk and hardcore because there were so few of
us and it was against everything we hated about the 70's and the music
establishment. We had to crack open places for us and other people to playin'
town. The very idea of an all-ages show horrified New York. But once we got in
and were able to do that, it exploded and all these bands came out. That
happened in a lot of places, and leaders in cracking open those towns were
Black Flag, the Dead Kennedys, and
D.O.A..

I'm one of the few people in this town who has articulate danger towards
the outbreak of punk fundamentalism, especially when the dictator of the
biggest local so-called punk magazine (Maximum Rock'n'roll) is now
advocating violence against people he doesn't like. What I've had to do is to
point out that not everybody who has a long and deep involvement with punk
wants to turn it into something bitter, fundamentalist, isolationist church,
and go around playing "cop" on other people. If that was the attitude I'd
found when I first got into punk, I would have gotten right back out again. I
think that circling the wagons and putting up fences right at a time when
millions of new people could potentially turn onto the politics and spirit of
punk is sad and irresponsible.

I don't think either the Offspring or Green
Day started their bands with the intention of becoming so enormously
popular; that sort of fell in their laps-especially the
Offspring. My attitude is if somebody blunders into the level
of popularity, at least remember the human factor. These guys are still human
beings and hopefully still have hearts and if you keep in touch with them
rather than vilify them you may be able to encourage them to go in the right
direction. What I'm hoping will eventually happen is that they will grasp the
amount of power and financial clout that is now at their fingertips and use
those as tools to help real people with real things the way punk politics was
always designed to do before, but nobody had any money.

The Grateful Dead, of all people, had been doing this for
years with a grant foundation. They would donate about a million dollars a
year from concert receipts or benefit concerts, and that money would then be
doled out to people that applied for the grant for everything from soup
kitchens, battered women's shelters, rural school districts who don't have any
money for instruments for a music program or an aspiring composer. It was a
way of putting the politics behind the music into something other than your
own pocket.

I still think, quality of the bands aside, the only reason this later batch
of bands(grunge, Green Day, the Offspring)
got signed and pushed was to help steer white suburban kids away from
political black rap music. Reggae they could buy-at least there the revolution
was aimed at Jamaica - but some of these people were talking about revolution
in the United States. "We can't have these future middle-class model citizens
finding out what America is really like!! No, no, no! Come on kids! Shoe gaze,
shoe gaze! Remember, you're slackers! You're Generation X! You're not
supposed to care!" The whole slacker myth was imposed from above after these
very alleged slackers helped throw George Bush out of the White House.

There isn't one magical solution. I do think that more people listen to
artists-especially rappers-and musicians than they do to politicians, and if
there're going to look at us for leadership and brain food, we ought to
provide some ideas for improvement over the current collapse of the Roman
Empire that we're witnessing in this country. I have tossed out some ideas on
Beyond the Valley of the Gift Police [Biafra's fourth spoken word
album], some of them sarcastic but some of them also very practical. There's a
lot of allegations about the [government and AIDS] that have even made the
London Times, and I haven't really made up my mind. It wouldn't surprise me a
bit, though, the way we play around with germ bombs in the country. There was
one group of military scientists who immediately went into the heart of Zaire
when they first heard about the Ebola virus, and there reaction instead of
wanting to exterminate it, was "Wow! Wouldn't this make a great toy? Let's
take some back to Fort Detrick, Maryland." And they did. And sure enough, some
of the monkeys escaped., but they were recaptured. But it makes me wonder how
many other things like that have happened where the germs did get out. There's
lots of evidence that that outbreak of hantavirus in New Mexico the Summer
before last that killed large numbers of Native Americans had actually been
leaked out of germ warfare lab right next to an Indian reservation in the
Southwest.

This is my home. Home is where the disease is. As long as I stay in
America, I'll never run out of subjects for songs.